oishe taught me Marx. As was his wont, this was a rigorous training. His graduate seminar on Capital began with the 1844 manuscripts, the “Theses on Feuerbach,” The Grundrisse, and after many weeks continued from chapter 1 to chapter 2 of Capital, volume 1. The slow pace and thorough exegesis of the texts was both by design and a product of Moishe’s temperamental commitment to relating parts to the whole. My interest in Marx was at the time and still is somewhat unorthodox. Working in the field of Chinese history, I am more interested in applying Marx’s insights to commodity circulation than commodity production. This being the case, Moishe might seem an equally unorthodox teacher. His reading of Capital centers on labor and value as a historically particular form of wealth and social mediation. That is to say, Moishe emphasized value production (with particular stress on what value was), whereas I have been interested in what happened when value, inhering in commodities, traveled. My work in Chinese history concerns foreign trade during the nineteenth century. I examine trade regulations, statecraft, and how capitalism, in the form of global and local commodity trades, intersected with and even reshaped these. I was initially trained in cultural history, discourse analysis, and postcolonial studies, and Moishe’s unintentional intervention into this project was the possibility—which surfaced at some point between reading chapter 1 and chapter 4—that discourse was part of structure. The British complaints about trading conditions in China, which were the immediate focus of my research at the time, were perhaps not only about oriental difference but also about what it meant to be a commodity owner. This seemingly small intervention was in fact a paradigm shift.
{"title":"Commercial Circulation and Abstract Domination","authors":"Stacie Kent","doi":"10.1086/708254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708254","url":null,"abstract":"oishe taught me Marx. As was his wont, this was a rigorous training. His graduate seminar on Capital began with the 1844 manuscripts, the “Theses on Feuerbach,” The Grundrisse, and after many weeks continued from chapter 1 to chapter 2 of Capital, volume 1. The slow pace and thorough exegesis of the texts was both by design and a product of Moishe’s temperamental commitment to relating parts to the whole. My interest in Marx was at the time and still is somewhat unorthodox. Working in the field of Chinese history, I am more interested in applying Marx’s insights to commodity circulation than commodity production. This being the case, Moishe might seem an equally unorthodox teacher. His reading of Capital centers on labor and value as a historically particular form of wealth and social mediation. That is to say, Moishe emphasized value production (with particular stress on what value was), whereas I have been interested in what happened when value, inhering in commodities, traveled. My work in Chinese history concerns foreign trade during the nineteenth century. I examine trade regulations, statecraft, and how capitalism, in the form of global and local commodity trades, intersected with and even reshaped these. I was initially trained in cultural history, discourse analysis, and postcolonial studies, and Moishe’s unintentional intervention into this project was the possibility—which surfaced at some point between reading chapter 1 and chapter 4—that discourse was part of structure. The British complaints about trading conditions in China, which were the immediate focus of my research at the time, were perhaps not only about oriental difference but also about what it meant to be a commodity owner. This seemingly small intervention was in fact a paradigm shift.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708254","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45837744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T he intellectual inquiries of Moishe Postone unfolded, as everyone’s do, from knowledge-forming interests. Some of these came in complex ways from his family and childhood. He chose not to follow his father into a rabbinical career, but his scholarly pursuits were informed both by Judaism and by antiSemitism—and clearly by scholarship. He also came to participate in what we might consider one of the most important secular extensions of Talmudic commentary, seeking to read Marx ever more deeply, in ways more adequate for our age, and in dialogue with other great thinkers of modernity like Freud, Durkheim, and Weber. As Talmudic scholars endlessly unfold meaning deemed already present in the Torah, Moishe studied Marx’s texts in pursuit of a theory that could make sense of the 1960s–70s crisis—and today’s—as well as of enduring patterns in capitalism and of the possibilities for emancipation. The project of reconstructing social theory through a deeper reading of Marx and especially his mature analyses of capitalism became Moishe’s life’s work. His reading, writing, and teaching were of course closely linked. And they were globally influential. Moishe set out to address limits in the perspective of the 1960s Left within which he had come of political age. As he recalled, as much about himself as others,
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B. Brayboy, K. T. Lomawaima, T. Mccarty, A. Castagno, Patricia D. Quijado Cerecer
{"title":"Editors’ Introduction","authors":"B. Brayboy, K. T. Lomawaima, T. Mccarty, A. Castagno, Patricia D. Quijado Cerecer","doi":"10.1086/708117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708117","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708117","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44979484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T he only task more difficult than writing a talk on the central role of abstraction in Moishe Postone’s remarkable oeuvre is trying to condense its argument into a mere 20 minutes, producing, as it were, an abstract of its essential points. My sole consolation is that any attempt to do so performatively exemplifies the impoverishment of human life caused by the process of abstraction that Moishe so powerfully lamented. A great deal has been written about his critique of that process—indeed, the literature on his work is no less robust today than it was when his magnum opus, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, was published a quarter century ago—and I do not want to squander my limited time doing what Moishe himself was so often forced to do: painstakingly rehearse the main argument of that book. Instead, I want to focus on the ways in which he conceptualized the antidote to what he saw as the twin tyrannies of abstract labor and abstract time and then finish with a few remarks defending the virtues of a certain version of abstraction, which I think Moishe would have shared. Still, a few quick points do have to bemade about his larger argument for those in the audience who do not have it at their fingertips. Moishe challenged what he disparagingly called “traditional Marxism” by rejecting the idea that a critique of capitalism can be made from the point of view of a transhistorical or ontological notion of unalienated labor, labor that is concrete rather than abstract. Nor can it be criticized from the point of view of production per se as opposed to inequitable distribution. Instead, it requires understanding that the duality of concrete and abstract labor is a function of the capitalist mode of production itself, which also generates the contrasting categories of value and wealth. Value is the objectification or reification of abstracted labor, in which the qualitative specificity of producing objects for use is transformed into the quantitative fungibility of commodified labor power
{"title":"Moishe Postone and the Vicissitudes of Abstraction","authors":"M. Jay","doi":"10.1086/708115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708115","url":null,"abstract":"T he only task more difficult than writing a talk on the central role of abstraction in Moishe Postone’s remarkable oeuvre is trying to condense its argument into a mere 20 minutes, producing, as it were, an abstract of its essential points. My sole consolation is that any attempt to do so performatively exemplifies the impoverishment of human life caused by the process of abstraction that Moishe so powerfully lamented. A great deal has been written about his critique of that process—indeed, the literature on his work is no less robust today than it was when his magnum opus, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, was published a quarter century ago—and I do not want to squander my limited time doing what Moishe himself was so often forced to do: painstakingly rehearse the main argument of that book. Instead, I want to focus on the ways in which he conceptualized the antidote to what he saw as the twin tyrannies of abstract labor and abstract time and then finish with a few remarks defending the virtues of a certain version of abstraction, which I think Moishe would have shared. Still, a few quick points do have to bemade about his larger argument for those in the audience who do not have it at their fingertips. Moishe challenged what he disparagingly called “traditional Marxism” by rejecting the idea that a critique of capitalism can be made from the point of view of a transhistorical or ontological notion of unalienated labor, labor that is concrete rather than abstract. Nor can it be criticized from the point of view of production per se as opposed to inequitable distribution. Instead, it requires understanding that the duality of concrete and abstract labor is a function of the capitalist mode of production itself, which also generates the contrasting categories of value and wealth. Value is the objectification or reification of abstracted labor, in which the qualitative specificity of producing objects for use is transformed into the quantitative fungibility of commodified labor power","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708115","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46337905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
arx was most likely far from the forefront of Michel Foucault’s mind when he wrote “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in 1971. Nonetheless, there is little reason to doubt that Foucault considered it as effective a critique ofMarx as of any other nineteenth-century historicist. Already in The Order of Things of 1966, Foucault had consigned Marx to a nineteenth-century epistemic order that he characterized in terms of the ultimate convergence of “historicity” with “the human essence.” It was in this context that he had made his famous remark that Marxism’s debates with bourgeois economics amounted to “no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool,” insofar as Marx’s thought “exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.” Given that Foucault would only grow more virulent in his antiMarxism as the years passed, there can be little doubt that his later genealogical critique was also presumed to encompass Marx in its embrace. This short article represents, as much as anything, the distillate of my experience as someone who came of age at the apex of Foucault’s anglophone influence in the late 1980s and 1990s, who taught works by both Foucault and Marx in the Social Sciences Core at theUniversity of Chicago, andwho thus had the opportunity to discuss themextensively inweekly instructormeetings under the leadership ofMoishe Postone, from 1998 to 2007. What, it asks, does Postone’s postfoundationalist and posthistoricist reading ofMarx look like when examined through the lens of Foucault’s case for Nietzschean genealogy? Foucault’s acute critique of historicism makes it possible to readMarx’s writings with a sharper eye to their conceptual distance from the variety of nineteenth-century historicism to which Foucault himself consigned them. Insofar as genealogy proves to have no critical purchase onMarx’s theoretical approach, however, Marx’s analysis of social form remains available to postfoundationalism as a framework that embraces categorial reflexivity as the basis for a radical critique of social domination from a standpoint immanent to social form.
{"title":"Genealogy, Critical Theory, History","authors":"A. Sartori","doi":"10.1086/707986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/707986","url":null,"abstract":"arx was most likely far from the forefront of Michel Foucault’s mind when he wrote “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in 1971. Nonetheless, there is little reason to doubt that Foucault considered it as effective a critique ofMarx as of any other nineteenth-century historicist. Already in The Order of Things of 1966, Foucault had consigned Marx to a nineteenth-century epistemic order that he characterized in terms of the ultimate convergence of “historicity” with “the human essence.” It was in this context that he had made his famous remark that Marxism’s debates with bourgeois economics amounted to “no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool,” insofar as Marx’s thought “exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.” Given that Foucault would only grow more virulent in his antiMarxism as the years passed, there can be little doubt that his later genealogical critique was also presumed to encompass Marx in its embrace. This short article represents, as much as anything, the distillate of my experience as someone who came of age at the apex of Foucault’s anglophone influence in the late 1980s and 1990s, who taught works by both Foucault and Marx in the Social Sciences Core at theUniversity of Chicago, andwho thus had the opportunity to discuss themextensively inweekly instructormeetings under the leadership ofMoishe Postone, from 1998 to 2007. What, it asks, does Postone’s postfoundationalist and posthistoricist reading ofMarx look like when examined through the lens of Foucault’s case for Nietzschean genealogy? Foucault’s acute critique of historicism makes it possible to readMarx’s writings with a sharper eye to their conceptual distance from the variety of nineteenth-century historicism to which Foucault himself consigned them. Insofar as genealogy proves to have no critical purchase onMarx’s theoretical approach, however, Marx’s analysis of social form remains available to postfoundationalism as a framework that embraces categorial reflexivity as the basis for a radical critique of social domination from a standpoint immanent to social form.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/707986","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47483118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A mong the most quoted texts in the literature of anthropology is no doubt Claude Lévi-Strauss’s short Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss first published in 1950. The passages that continue to exercise an enormous force of attraction on readers are those pertaining to the notion of mana, a concept— or, as Lévi-Strauss would call it, a signifier—which itself functions as a name for just such forces of attraction in the “primitive” cultures analyzed by Mauss as well as by his uncle, Émile Durkheim. Lévi-Strauss famously argued that mana functions in the way his two predecessors claimed before all in their own writings: “So we can see that in one case, at least, the notion of mana does present those characteristics of a secret power, a mysterious force, which Durkheim and Mauss attributed to it: for such is the role it plays in their own system.Mana really ismana there.” Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to critique and, ultimately, disenchant the concept by analyzing it as a linguistic phenomenon, as the name for a structural feature of all human languages that comes to be hypostatized, treated as a substantial reality, has, it would seem, itself absorbed a remnant of the force it was meant to dissolve. The work of disenchantment can, it would seem, exercise its own considerable charms. Lévi-Strauss’s account of the emergence and persistence of notions like mana is essentially an anthropogenic one itself structured around a conceptual impasse or
{"title":"Marx and Manatheism","authors":"É. Santner","doi":"10.1086/708116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708116","url":null,"abstract":"A mong the most quoted texts in the literature of anthropology is no doubt Claude Lévi-Strauss’s short Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss first published in 1950. The passages that continue to exercise an enormous force of attraction on readers are those pertaining to the notion of mana, a concept— or, as Lévi-Strauss would call it, a signifier—which itself functions as a name for just such forces of attraction in the “primitive” cultures analyzed by Mauss as well as by his uncle, Émile Durkheim. Lévi-Strauss famously argued that mana functions in the way his two predecessors claimed before all in their own writings: “So we can see that in one case, at least, the notion of mana does present those characteristics of a secret power, a mysterious force, which Durkheim and Mauss attributed to it: for such is the role it plays in their own system.Mana really ismana there.” Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to critique and, ultimately, disenchant the concept by analyzing it as a linguistic phenomenon, as the name for a structural feature of all human languages that comes to be hypostatized, treated as a substantial reality, has, it would seem, itself absorbed a remnant of the force it was meant to dissolve. The work of disenchantment can, it would seem, exercise its own considerable charms. Lévi-Strauss’s account of the emergence and persistence of notions like mana is essentially an anthropogenic one itself structured around a conceptual impasse or","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708116","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42683649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
n 1993, Moishe Postone published Time, Labor, and Social Domination, which revolutionized our understanding of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism. Scholars from various disciplines have approached this work in relation to its contributions with respect to Postone’s critique of class in capitalism and his unique reading of commodity fetishism, among a host of other themes. However, it is rare for people to focus on the Jewish dimension of his work. Although those who have known Moishe Postone personally will confirm that he deemed Judaism extremely important and that he has at times privately commented on Jewish dimensions of his reading of Marx, in his written work, he primarily deals with Jewishness in his discussion of the Shoah and anti-Semitism. Recently, his colleague formany years,William Sewell, has challenged this trend and commented on Postone’s Jewish upbringing and his reading of Capital: “I believe that Moishe’s deep Jewish heritage and his father’s rabbinical vocation influenced much about his life and thought. . . . It is my hunch that Moishe’s training in Torah interpretation must have unconsciously influenced his approach to Marx’s Capital and the Grundrisse in his magnum opus, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Whatever else it may be, Moishe’s book is a profoundly exegetical work—in that it assumes the essential truth of Marx’s text and relies on a close and meticulous reading and argument to disclose this truth to
{"title":"Moishe Postone’s Historical Time: Capital, the Holocaust, and Jewish Marxism","authors":"V. Murthy","doi":"10.1086/708009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708009","url":null,"abstract":"n 1993, Moishe Postone published Time, Labor, and Social Domination, which revolutionized our understanding of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism. Scholars from various disciplines have approached this work in relation to its contributions with respect to Postone’s critique of class in capitalism and his unique reading of commodity fetishism, among a host of other themes. However, it is rare for people to focus on the Jewish dimension of his work. Although those who have known Moishe Postone personally will confirm that he deemed Judaism extremely important and that he has at times privately commented on Jewish dimensions of his reading of Marx, in his written work, he primarily deals with Jewishness in his discussion of the Shoah and anti-Semitism. Recently, his colleague formany years,William Sewell, has challenged this trend and commented on Postone’s Jewish upbringing and his reading of Capital: “I believe that Moishe’s deep Jewish heritage and his father’s rabbinical vocation influenced much about his life and thought. . . . It is my hunch that Moishe’s training in Torah interpretation must have unconsciously influenced his approach to Marx’s Capital and the Grundrisse in his magnum opus, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Whatever else it may be, Moishe’s book is a profoundly exegetical work—in that it assumes the essential truth of Marx’s text and relies on a close and meticulous reading and argument to disclose this truth to","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42866226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
W age work, it is said, is disappearing in the “new” age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Yet there is little agreement about why, where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the foreseeable future. We—scholars, politicians, pundits, people at large—seem unable to think beyond a universe founded on mass employment. Why not? After all, capital has always striven to free itself as far as possible from a dependency on labor, with considerable success over the long run. This despite the fact that historical anthropologies have tended to focus on the “unmaking of particular working classes” primarily in recent decades. Or the fact that there have been times in the global north during which organized labor has managed to exercise its political and economic muscle—although, as is now widely recognized, more people have always been wageless than waged. But if mass employment has always been threatened by erasure, always more aspiration than actuality, why does it remain so central to both popular and theoretical understandings of economy and society under capitalism, alike left and right? Why does it “dominate and pervade everyday life . . . more completely than at any time in recent history”? Howmight this relate to anxieties about its imminent
{"title":"After Labor","authors":"J. Comaroff, J. Comaroff","doi":"10.1086/708007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708007","url":null,"abstract":"W age work, it is said, is disappearing in the “new” age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Yet there is little agreement about why, where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the foreseeable future. We—scholars, politicians, pundits, people at large—seem unable to think beyond a universe founded on mass employment. Why not? After all, capital has always striven to free itself as far as possible from a dependency on labor, with considerable success over the long run. This despite the fact that historical anthropologies have tended to focus on the “unmaking of particular working classes” primarily in recent decades. Or the fact that there have been times in the global north during which organized labor has managed to exercise its political and economic muscle—although, as is now widely recognized, more people have always been wageless than waged. But if mass employment has always been threatened by erasure, always more aspiration than actuality, why does it remain so central to both popular and theoretical understandings of economy and society under capitalism, alike left and right? Why does it “dominate and pervade everyday life . . . more completely than at any time in recent history”? Howmight this relate to anxieties about its imminent","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47053265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T his article attempts to outline an alternative account of the distinction between the gift and the commodity. It does so from the view that clarifying their relationship is a good idea because the distinction between gift and commodity has deeply informed the way in which the scientific field comprehends those who live(d) within the compass of kinship and community. The pairing of gift and commodity has served as a metaphor, trope, and conceptual opposition in the construction of the comparative discourse of who our others are, and it is also reflexively one of the critical oppositions through which the cultures of capitalism imagine themselves (e.g., as evidenced by the museology of primitive art). The relationship has an equally powerful historical dimension in that the progressive displacement of gifts by the commodity is central to understanding the ways in which capitalism is subsuming the economic breath of others. An analysis on this order is inescapably a tribute to Mauss, whose work on the gift is still present in its consequences, and in a different register to the power of capitalism to socially replicate itself through forms of self-recognition that only enhance a deeper concealment. Beginning in the 1970s, theorists began to realize that because theory and ethnography are inherently comparative we must organize our thoughts as a confrontation between the social logic of the commodity and that of the gift. The key claim here is that the epistemological integrity of the ethnographic project depends on appreciating the character of this opposition because science can only understand others when we interrogate the “metaphors” through which we think our analyses.
{"title":"Gifts, Commodities, and the Encompassment of Others","authors":"E. Lipuma, M. Postone","doi":"10.1086/708255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708255","url":null,"abstract":"T his article attempts to outline an alternative account of the distinction between the gift and the commodity. It does so from the view that clarifying their relationship is a good idea because the distinction between gift and commodity has deeply informed the way in which the scientific field comprehends those who live(d) within the compass of kinship and community. The pairing of gift and commodity has served as a metaphor, trope, and conceptual opposition in the construction of the comparative discourse of who our others are, and it is also reflexively one of the critical oppositions through which the cultures of capitalism imagine themselves (e.g., as evidenced by the museology of primitive art). The relationship has an equally powerful historical dimension in that the progressive displacement of gifts by the commodity is central to understanding the ways in which capitalism is subsuming the economic breath of others. An analysis on this order is inescapably a tribute to Mauss, whose work on the gift is still present in its consequences, and in a different register to the power of capitalism to socially replicate itself through forms of self-recognition that only enhance a deeper concealment. Beginning in the 1970s, theorists began to realize that because theory and ethnography are inherently comparative we must organize our thoughts as a confrontation between the social logic of the commodity and that of the gift. The key claim here is that the epistemological integrity of the ethnographic project depends on appreciating the character of this opposition because science can only understand others when we interrogate the “metaphors” through which we think our analyses.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708255","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48341860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
W hen many of us here today were talking about Moishe—this past spring—Marty Jay and Cathy Gallagher were in New York visiting and we were having just that discussion among ourselves when I asked Cathy what had made Moishe so lovable. She had already thought it over, I am sure, because a moment later, to know what she had said, I had to think back onwhat I had just heard, “Well, he was so present.”Cathy speaks very quickly. But, it is true, I decided, catching up with her after another moment. Moishe was right there. One thinks of the urgent, parsing, orderliness of mind; of an innately deliberative politeness, which he somehow joinedwith a refusal hands-downof anymisunderstanding; and one thinks, especially, of the focused clarity of his voice, as if he might have been more the son of the cantor than of the rabbi. The first time I heard Moishe give a talk, when I was by no means young, was also the very first time I understood an hour-long lecture fromfirst to last syllable andwas able to conclude, as well, that having heard it might have done me some good. When I spoke about the lecture afterward with Moishe, appreciatively, and to introduce myself, he somehow gave me to understand that the achievement had been mine entirely. Butwhat Imost sensed in the presence ofMoishe,whatwemust all have recognized in him, consciously or not, was some part of fleeing humanity that, long before Moishe arrived here in the United States from Canada, had already covered many more miles than that, and not just in this direction, and not just as one person fleeing. One listened to Moishe’s exacting diction, closely, wondering what language was actually being spoken. I would not have told him so—and I hesitate to say it now—but I considered him a relative at the remove of some quantum considerably greater than six million. Moishe Postone’s commitment was to a monotheism of
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